Newsletter #3: Let's Change The World (Of Academic Publishing)!

Hi there, and welcome to ScholarlyHub’s third newsletter!

Let’s begin with our most fun piece of news: we have a brand new video that you can share with friends and colleagues to tell them about ScholarlyHub and why we need it. We co-produced it with our friend Carlos Ortiz.

Fundraiser

We’re happy to report that we had a full house at our very first fundraiser on 26 January, with friends, scholars and open access advocates gathering to share an Italian aperitivo and food, and collect their new ScholarlyHub stickers! If you couldn’t make it but you would like a sneak peek of the people behind ScholarlyHub, check out the video of the fundraiser event below:

Tel Aviv Event

On 10 January the Shaharit Institute and Academia for Equality in Israel hosted us in Tel Aviv for an open event to discuss the present and future of open access and the role of ScholarlyHub. Thanks to all those who attended and to Hilla Dayan and our board member Ofer Sitbon for organizing!

Donation Updates

A lot has happened over the last weeks, as small donations keep coming in daily, from Australia to Austria, and from Singapore to Saudi Arabia. We’ve now raised 12,500, which is great, but there’s a long way still to go!

With your help, we can launch a new platform where members are in control and access to scholarship is open to all, not just to a select few who can afford it. If you haven’t already, please consider donating and asking friends and colleagues to do the same so we can create a scholarly social network together -one that doesn’t profit off your data or research but will be entirely non-profit (so no buy-outs or hostile take-overs) and committed to the scholarly commons.

Also, a big thanks to everyone who has donated so far! We also have some brand new stickers so if you have donated or donate now and you want to spruce up your laptop, phone or office door, shoot us an email and we’ll send you your own ScholarlyHub sticker pack.

Open Access Resources Kit

Speaking of resources, we now have a new page up on the site full of ScholarlyHub material to share with friends and colleagues. It includes videos, visual material like logos and banners to share on conference slides as well as standardised emails you can copy-paste to tell your colleagues, local librarian or learned society all about ScholarlyHub and how they can support it.

And if you ever find yourself asked to peer review for a for-profit journal but short of an answer, we’ve got you covered. Our email templates will make it easier to say a constructive ‘no’ to journal editors, and will hopefully nudge them to consider publishing in a more sustainable way instead.

News! News!

Tech Team Member

We’re about to add a new team member, who will head the effort to design the technical programming brief for the ScholarlyHub website design. Since we don’t want to reinvent the open access wheel but contribute to and build on the achievements of the open access movement, our goal is to operate as a portal for and a gateway into existing services. Watch our social media feeds for the latest updates on all things tech.

We’ve also been featured on the LSE Impact Blog with an article by ScholarlyHub’s Björn Brembs and Guy Geltner.

“It’s not every day that a neurogeneticist and a medieval historian write a post together, let alone for the LSE Impact Blog. But the overall urgency to provide scholarship with a Web 2.0 infrastructure clearly straddles all fields. As highlighted by recent debates about net neutrality, access to information on the web constantly faces the threat of being increasingly defined by narrow financial interests. It’s the same with access to scholarship, which is becoming the privilege of the few; that is, those who can pay handsomely for it”

Read all about how ScholarlyHub proposes to change the status quo of academic publishing, here.

We’ve also got an article coming up in the VSNU E-zine, and there’s a new article on the blog by Guy Geltner and April Hathcock, which has been accepted by UKSG’s Insights Magazine.

“That academic publishing has reached this scale of growth and financial invasiveness is scandalous. It’s hard to blame companies for wanting to expand, yet the ease with which they have been able to do so can also be traced to academics’ addiction to prestige and their and the general public’s willful ignorance and apathy. Publish-or-perish mentalities pervasive to many scholarly fields likewise play an important role in syphoning billions in public and foundation money and rerouting it towards for-profit publishing conglomerates. “